Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404170002
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
"Global rail revival is propelled by a crisis . . . a steady worsening of air quality and traffic congestion," the Washington-based environmental group says in its report, "Back on Track," released Saturday.
For example, the German government, in trying to ease problems of unification, has reversed past priorities with a plan to spend more on upgrading railways than highways until the year 2010, the report said. China recently announced a $20 billion rail development plan but then scaled it back.
The end of the Cold War has produced agreement by 12 countries for a $76 billion plan to link Europe's major cities with nearly 18,000 miles of high-speed rail lines.
Even though U.S. passenger train travel rose 50 percent the past decade, the nation continues to lag behind other countries in subsidizing it in comparison with other modes of transportation, said the report's author, Marcia Lowe.
As a result, she said, "the future is clouded" for Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corp., because of deteriorating equipment and inadequate capital funding.
U.S. lawmakers contend that subsidies for rail are unaffordable, "but you never hear a congressman asking if we can afford highway travel," Lowe said.
"If you total the social costs of accidents, congestion and pollution, you find that driving is twice as expensive as flying and seven times as expensive as train travel," she said.
The Clinton administration is encouragingly supportive of rail, Lowe said, but "the funding isn't there."
Americans suffer from "a delusion that driving your car is free," when in fact the United States subsidizes all forms of transportation, she said.
Lowe suggested that Americans might tolerate further increases in the federal gasoline tax, now 18 cents a gallon, if they knew it was going for non-highway programs, including upgrading rail corridors.
"Two railroad tracks can carry as many people in an hour as a 16-lane highway," the Worldwatch report said. "And compare Chicago's sprawling O'Hare Airport - the world's busiest with 60 million passengers a year - with St. Lazare train station in Paris, which handles more than twice that number in a fraction of the space."
The report said the United States doesn't fully utilize its 112,800-mile rail network, the world's longest. Even though railroads carried 37 percent of the nation's intercity freight in 1992 - a much higher proportion than in Japan or any western European country except Switzerland - they had 80 percent of that market in 1925.
by CNB